We, Public Fiction, propose to take on this assignment. We’ll be your man in Los Angeles reporting fearlessly on the factual, the fictitious and the imaginary.

First, we will set up shop, and inaugurate a place for us to call back from. In this storefront we will invent an office and its functions, we will labor to produce situations, happenings and dispatches on a weekly basis. We will broadcast our experiments back into the world. In this improbable place of our invention we will blend truth and tale for the benefit of either one person at a time, or sometimes a crowd of many (in either circumstance we will provide cold cans of beer and refreshing soft drinks for all). Part residency, part business, part factory, part place of gathering, a consistent buzz of activity is to be expected in the concrete walls of our construct.

This improbable place is like the elaborate hoax in The Sting, an environment crafted for the benefit (or perhaps the detriment) of a single gesture. It is the library in Richard Brautigan’s The Abortion where anybody who writes a book can drop it off, never to be read but always to be cared for. It is at its most basic a stand-in for the territory of the page facing a writer about to write, the visions that fill out sight and space for an artist. And it is open to the public.